On The Horizon

On The Horizon, 14x11 inches on canvas

Most of the time, when I start a new piece, I have maybe an idea for a starting point – a color or technique – but it’s usually fairly vague. I enjoy the exploratory process of creating an artwork.

Only once in a while do I know exactly how I want the finished piece to look.

This is one of the second type. I had this image in my head for a  couple weeks and couldn’t get rid of it. Kind of like when you have a song stuck in your head and it keeps playing in your head until you sing it outloud. That was this painting. It kept pushing itself to the front of my mind and interrupting whatever else I was doing. I couldn’t concentrate on anything else until it was painted.

I kept seeing a picture where the top 2/3 was a light brown-ochre. The lower 1/3 was a dark gray-green. In between was a flurry of white and tiny bits of teal green.

The image feels like a landscape, though I don’t know if it’s supposed to be water or mountains or land. Or even if it’s a close-up or distant view. You’d think I’d know, but I don’t.

I used a stretched canvas that I’d pre-painted with some bright yellows and greens and red. I also used some candle wax as a resist – something that would prevent the paint from sticking.

I know, I know – you’re making a painting. Why wouldn’t you want the paint to stick?

On The Horizon, Detail

A resist is handy when you want to protect a previous layer of a painting. Watercolorists use resists to protect the white areas of their paintings. I like to use a resist to create interesting designs, and I’ve experimented with a variety of products to see how they work.

For this one, I’d put some colors on the canvas, and when they were dry, I lit a candle and dripped wax into a dot pattern on the canvas. Then I painted over everything. When my paint was again dry, I chipped off the candle wax, leaving these lovely little dots of the earlier colors showing through.

The cool thing about the wax was that the paint puddled up in a ridge around each wax dot. When I chipped the wax off, the paint had formed little craters around where the wax had been. So not only does the painting have dots, it has a really cool texture.

Now it’s done. Maybe it will leave me alone and I can get some rest.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 18th, 2011 at 2:23 pm. It is filed under Abstracts, Gallery and tagged with abstract, acrylic, painting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.